By Fernanda Santos
April 14, 2010, 9:26 am
Jeff Simmons and Alfonso Quiroz and their dog, Bruno, in Manhattan on Tuesday. Bruno was lost and found in Queens.
This is the story of a dog with his own Facebook page and newsletter who slipped away from his collar and spent hours and hours wandering the streets of Jackson Heights, Queens, until a stranger took him home. It is also the story of the speed of modern communications, lots of posters, a few coincidences, and two dog owners with more than your average connections.
The dog’s name is Bruno the Brussels, and he is somewhat obsessed with squirrels, of the plastic squeaky type. He spends most week days at a doggy day care in TriBeCa, but on Thursday, his owners, Alfonso Quiroz and Jeff Simmons, a former reporter for NY1 News, had early-morning plans that forced a change in routine. They left Bruno at home and entrusted a neighbor with taking the dog out for walks at noon and 5 p.m.
The neighbor had trouble fitting Bruno into a harness, and so clipped Bruno’s leash to his collar instead. As they strolled along 81st Street, near 34th Avenue, Bruno wiggled out of his collar and ran away.
“The dog just got loose,” said a text message that Mr. Quiroz received sometime around noon that day.
Mr. Quiroz, a spokesman for Con Edison, hopped on a cab, bound for home. Along the way, he called his sister in Chicago and asked her to design a simple lost-dog poster with Bruno’s picture and description, and then e-mail the poster to him. Mr. Quiroz also asked a friend to do some research on the Web about how to search for a lost dog.
“Bruno,” Mr. Quiroz said, “means the world to Jeff and I.”
A Brussels griffon, Bruno was the last in a litter of puppies born in southern New Jersey on Jan. 5, 2009. He has short caramel hair, floppy ears and eyes that seem to beg for your undivided attention. Mr. Simmons, who was allergic to dogs as a child, bought it last June for Mr. Quiroz, who grew up in a house full of them.
Mr. Quiroz made 3,000 copies of the poster his sister had created. But before he left the house on Thursday at 1:59 p.m., he posted a message on Bruno’s Facebook page. “Bruno the Brussels is lost,” the message said. “Please look for him.”
Right about that time, Juan Arroyave, a window mechanic from Colombia who lives in College Point, Queens, was leaving a store on Roosevelt Avenue, by 84th Street, when he saw Bruno running in and out of traffic, with no one behind him. Mr. Arroyave did not think much of it until he spotted Bruno again, about 10 blocks from where he had first seen him on Roosevelt Avenue.
“I thought to myself, ‘This dog is too beautiful to be a street dog,’ ” Mr. Arroyave said. “So I went running after him until I caught him.”
Mr. Arroyave took Bruno home and started calling him “niño,” which is also the name of his Shih Tzu, who had disappeared once, for 15 days, and was found in a house three blocks away.
Meanwhile, Mr. Quiroz, Mr. Simmons and an army of helpers that included a former city councilwoman, Helen Sears, and an assemblyman, Michael G. DenDekker, were traveling the streets in and around Jackson Heights, looking for Bruno. Mr. Simmons found himself leaning out the window of Mr. Sears’s car at one point, squeezing Bruno’s favorite toy squirrel and calling his name.
“Someone told us early on that Bruno is a Velcro dog because when he sleeps at night, he’ll curl up by your feet; when he sits on the couch, he’ll put his rump against your leg,” said Mr. Simmons, vice president for communications at the Alliance for Downtown New York. “He needs human contact to feel secure and that’s what got to us, that he could be all alone out there.”
Mr. Arroyave said that Bruno tried to snuggle against him in bed at night, but he shooed him away.
By Friday morning, at least 20,000 people had received an e-mail message with Bruno’s wanted poster attached to it, or all the names that Yetta Kurland, who ran against City Council Speaker Christine C. Quinn in the Democratic primaries last September, had compiled during her campaign. A call for help went up on NY1 News and on neighborhood e-mail groups.
Mr. Quiroz, Mr. Simmons, their neighbors and their friends spent hours distributing the posters in animal clinics and pet shops, and affixing them to store windows on 37th Avenue, front doors on 34th Avenue and lampposts along Northern Boulevard.
That is where Mr. Arroyave found one of them Friday afternoon. He had gone back to the area to see if he would come across some sign of an owner looking for a lost dog. He called a cellphone number listed on the poster and reached Mr. Quiroz. “I got your dog,” Mr. Arroyave told him.
Mr. Quiroz said that when he was in college, he watched the 1948 Italian classic “Bicycle Thieves,” about a man who wanders the streets of Rome searching for his stolen bicycle and takes his young son, Bruno, in tow.
Mr. Quiroz said that the boy in the movie and his dog had the same sad eyes. He said it was those eyes that he first saw emerge from behind a wall when he walked into Mr. Arroyave’s home Friday night and called Bruno’s name.
Source: http://cityroom.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/04/14/a-little-dog-touches-off-a-big-search/
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